Vegetal Studies

Vegetal anti-metaphysics: Learning from plants
Michael Marder
Cont Philos Rev (2011) 44:469–489

Alluding to the heteronomy of plants, Hegel views the seed as ‘‘an indifferent
thing’’: ‘‘In the grain of seed [Samenkorn] the plant appears as a simple, immediate
unity of the self and the genus. Thus, the seed, on account of the immediacy of its
individuality, is an indifferent thing; it falls into the earth, which is for it the
universal power.’’59 We might add that the seed, entrusted to the randomness of
chance and the externality of its medium (the earth), maintains an ineliminable
possibility of being wasted, spread, or spent for nothing, the possibility that is
indicative of its freedom. But before the fall of the Hegelian seed into the earth, the
plant’s lack of individuality is cast in terms of the ‘‘simple, immediate unity of the
self and the genus.’’ Given that the seed’s self, relegated to the universality of the
element and of light, is always external to itself, this unity is, at the same time, a
disunity, a double indifference of the light and the earth to the seeds they nourish
and of the seeds to their self-preservation, their own fate, since they have no
intimate self to preserve. With this observation, we have stepped over the threshold
of Derridian dissemination, where the breakdown of the unity and identity of the
seed spells out the multiplicity it shelters even in the singular form: ‘‘…numerical
multiplicity does not sneak up like a death threat upon a germ cell previously one
with itself. On the contrary, it serves as a path-breaker for ‘the’ seed, which
therefore produces (itself) and advances only in the plural. It is a singular plural,
which no single origin will have preceded.’’60 In its singularity, the seed is already a
legion: whether spilled or spread, it is both one and many. Denoting animal and
vegetal modes of reproduction alike, it is, nevertheless, uniquely appropriate to each
animal and to each plant. The seed’s singular plurality, adopted by Jean-Luc Nancy
in his own thinking of community,61 thus, sketches out a model of justice
understood as the aporetic confluence of indifferent universality (‘‘seed’’ defying the
boundaries between species and even kingdoms) and attention to singularity (its
appropriateness to each).
The figure of the plant that, like a weed, incarnates everything the metaphysical
tradition deems to be improper, superficial, inessential, purely exterior, turns into
the prototype of a post-metaphysical being. Plants are the weeds of metaphysics:
devalued, unwanted in its carefully cultivated garden, yet growing in-between the
classical metaphysical categories of the thing, the animal, and the human—for, the
place of the weed is, precisely, in-between62—and quietly gaining the upper hand
over that which is cherished, tamed, and ‘‘useful.’’ Despite all the abuses to which
they are subjected, the weeds and, more generally, the plants will outlive
metaphysics.

59 Hegel (2004, p. 323).
60 Derrida (1983, p. 304).
61 Cf. Nancy (2000).
62 Deleuze and Guattari (1987, p. 19).

(Marden 2011, p. 487-488)